China Center Program Manager Shane Leary joins Miles Yu to discuss Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry's visit to Beijing, and the broader strategy of the Biden administration for engaging with Beijing. They then turn to speculations surrounding the People's Republic of China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang's absence since June 25, before covering Pope Francis's approval of Shen Bin, a Chinese Communist Party–appointed bishop in Shanghai, and the state of religious liberty in China. Follow the China Center's work at: https://www.hudson.org/china-center
China Center Program Manager Shane Leary joins Miles Yu to discuss Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry's visit to Beijing, and the broader strategy of the Biden administration for engaging with Beijing. They then turn to speculations surrounding the People's Republic of China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang's absence since June 25, before covering Pope Francis's approval of Shen Bin, a Chinese Communist Party–appointed bishop in Shanghai, and the state of religious liberty in China.
Follow the China Center's work at: https://www.hudson.org/china-center
Miles Yu:
Welcome to China Insider, a podcast from Hudson Institute's China Center.
Shane Leary:
It's Tuesday, July 18th, and for our new listeners, welcome to the China Insider. I'm Shane Leary, Program Manager of the China Center at Hudson Institute, and each week I sit down with Miles Yu, our Center's director and Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute to discuss three topics on US-China relations and domestic politics in China. With that said, we have three topics for this week. First, we'll get Miles reflections on John Kerry's visit to China, whether we should be hopeful about cooperation with the PRC and climate issues and the Biden Administration's general strategy of engagement with the PRC. Second, we'll discuss the mysterious disappearance of the Chinese foreign Minister Qin Gang. And third, we'll talk about the controversial appointment of a new bishop in Shanghai and how the CCP exercises its control over religion in China. Miles, how are you?
Miles Yu:
Very good, Shane.
Shane Leary.
Great. So for our first topic today, former US Secretary of State and current special presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry is wrapping up his visit to China With this visit, the hope of the Biden administration is to restart the joint working group on climate between the US and China formed in 2021 and to generally reopen cooperation on climate since the fallout from the Pelosi visit this past year halted engagement on that front. Just for some background, China is the number one polluter globally and shows no signs of slowing down. Having approved a record number of coal plants recently quadrupling the number of approved plants from 2021 to 22. A total of 106 gigawatts of new coal power has been approved in China in the past year. Which to put this in perspective, China's building six times as many coal plants as the rest of the world combined today. More generally though, this is the third cabinet level visit we've seen since Blinken’s trip just recently in mid-June of this year. So far, neither Blinken nor Yellen's visits have resulted in any fundamental changes or even meaningful declarations following the trip. Miles. Do you think this one might be different? Do you expect meaningful cooperation on climate going forward? And lastly, what is the general aim of the Biden administration with this series of visits?
Miles Yu:
No, I don't think there will be any meaningful progress in this wave of capping the personnel visiting to China. That's because US and China, they're playing different kind of game and the United States try to engage China from a mostly transactional and a managerial perspective. That is, we have specific issues to deal with, for Blinken it is to establish a military hotline to prevent accidental firing and that might lead to a major confrontation between the two militaries. For Yellen is to basically to engage China on some specific economic issues to stabilize global economy. For Kerry obviously is, as you say, it is a climate. China emits about one-third of global CO2 gases and United States is about the 11%. It's very transactional. The Chinese are playing the totally different game. They were not transactional, they were not managerial, they were strategic. They want to force America to engage China to use transactional issues as a bargaining chip to force America to submit to China's vision of the world of the strategic objectives.
So all these visits to China of recent month is a result of the original March 2023 phone call between President Biden and the General Secretary Xi Jinping in that phone call China insist America must agree to the following five strategic objectives to which President Biden agreed. So the five things that Biden promised Xi are number one, the United States do not seek to change China's political system. In other words, US will not really be on the side of the Chinese people to do anything. That Chinese Communist Party would regard it as a regime change. Number two, do not seek a new Cold War. In other words, from a Chinese perspective, if China wants to change the global or geopolitical order and bully its neighbors United States would not do anything because China will view that as a American engagement in the Cold War. Number three, president Biden promised Xi Jinping United States would not form anti-China alliance, which means that United States will give up its aligned system with friends and allies and access to democracy was some people term it. Number four, president Biden promise Xi Jinping United States would not change. The One China Policy with regard to Taiwan in the Chinese parlance is called One China Principle, which basically includes one thing that is Taiwan is part of the People's Republic of China. Number five, president Biden promised Xi Jinping, United States would not seek to confront China. This is very broad in general because United States cannot do anything that China would be as critical of the regime. So the Chinese government regards anything the United States does to criticize China as confrontational. For example, United States would not say anything and should not say anything about China's treatment of the Uyghurs and Tibetans and the Falungong’s and all dissident. So this is the five promises. So this is very, very tricky because for the Chinese side, they know the eagerness of the Biden administration to engage China transactionally and managerially. So they led all the condition for this corporation.
Therefore, United States would not give any agency for the Chinese Communist Party to play any role at all in the nature and direction of your China relationship. That is everything. Whether it is going to be good or bad in the bilateral relationship would totally depend on the United States. And China complains after that, the March 2023 Biden-Xi call is that there's no specific cabinet level follow up from the United States. In other words, after this promises made by President Biden for several months, there was no cabinet level specific steps to implement the five strategic conditions China led out to which the President of the United States agreed to. So that's why the Biden team relented. So they keep sending all the secretaries to China to follow through, hoping still from the transactional managerial perspective, but China is emphasizing the five conditions that were discussed during the March 2023 call.
So that's why you have different playbooks right now. In my view, all the secretaries visit to China were mission impossible because United States in no way would and could give up many of the things and the inspirational values and principles of the United States. So I think China has played exactly the same game as it did in 1971. 1972 with the Richard Nixon administration. Richard Nixon went to China to solve one particular problem in general, that is to get out of the Vietnam war. China said we cannot be just transactional. We got to incorporate at a much more strategic level. You got to give up Taiwan, you got to give up all other things and let's form a anti-Soviet alliance. So this is basically exactly the same playbook. So every time American Secretary visits to China, either Blinken, Yellen, or Kerry, China would do something very cantankerous and provocative and to hypertension.
So in order to gain negotiation bargain at the table, for example, at the very moment we're talking about carriers visit to China. China is conducting unprecedented large military drill around Taiwan and that involves more aircraft carrier, more aircraft and the more firepower as they were before. So you got 16 warships circle Taiwan in a single day. That's a record, right? And you got the China's not just the Eastern theater, but also northern southern theater forces to participate and China is conducting 250 sorties with fighter jets and bombers. So this is always a show of strength so that Mr. Kerry will go to China to not talk about any other things and accept, agree to the original agreements that was reflected in the March 2023 phone call between Biden and Xi.
Shane Leary:
So while we're tying our hands and compelling ourselves to only focus on these specific transactional issues and ignoring the broader strategic differences and differences in the two country's visions for the world, isn't it the case that these things are just fundamentally incompatible that agreement and cooperation on an issue like climate? As it seems, China's trying to insulate itself away from energy dependency on others with perhaps broader aims like the reunification of Taiwan. Isn't it the case that China's broader strategic aims and our transactional aims are just fundamentally incompatible?
Miles Yu:
Absolutely the only Secretary of State in the history of relationship between us and China who got it right, it was Mike Pompeo. I mean he said famously that we can no longer ignore the tremendous political and ideological differences between these two countries. It's two systems, so you just cannot deal with China from transactional point of view. When we say bilateral relationship, actually it's not quite accurate. The true nature of US-China relationship is trilateral. It's a US-CCP relationship on one hand also US and Chinese people relationship. So there is an equation there. The differences between Chinese government and Chinese people are huge and we have to understand that. Every day the Chinese Communist government thinks about is about the regime survival. It faces enormous, enormous resistance from the Chinese society. The United States must, must engage not only with the Chinese Communist Party on a transactional basis, we also must engage with the Chinese people and that's very key.
And unless you really, really deal with that issue, I don't see any sort of substantial progress to be made in this trilateral relationship, as I said. No matter what the US wants to do, Chinese government is going to continue to do what it likes regarding climate change. China has never tried to solve the problem. They doing exactly opposite while in the last 10 years. So developed countries, particularly the United States has dramatically reduced its CO2 emission. China's share of the global CO2 emission has skyrocketed and it's continued that way. So China has never meant to really, really respond to the appeals of the world, particularly the United States, let alone Mr. John Kerry, who has been humiliated from the day one of the Biden administration by the Chinese government.
Shane Leary:
Switching gears, Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang has been out of public view for three weeks now. He missed the recent Ian meetings in Indonesia this past week, citing health reasons and was last seen in public June 25th. Miles, it's difficult to find much on this in English language media. Most are simply speculating about health issues, although the English arm of Japan's Kyoto News recently published a story regarding some claims floating around Twitter that this disappearance has something to do with an extramarital affair between Qin and a prominent Chinese television journalist. What is your take on this disappearance? What's going on here? Do you buy any of the accounts floating around?
Miles Yu:
The only thing that's for sure is he disappeared. Only thing we don’t know is the reasons. I mean that's just a wild speculation. The Chinese has never disappeared one of his key senior leaders on kind of extramarital affairs because it's so commonplace, many people speculate that he is sick. Some people say he even died in the hospital. Other people said he had an extra marital affair and some people say no, he was involved in some kind of espionage case. It's all speculation. We don't know. Simply all we know is he's no-show for nearly three weeks now. When the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson was asked the other day, what happened to your boss, the foreign minister, and he didn't know how to say, he paused for 15 seconds and he say, next question. So this is a very, very dramatic, now it's dramatic but also not surprising because we have to understand the logic of dictatorship.
It's arrogance of power. So disappearance of this kind of senior persons happens this commonplace. It happens all the time. So because it is a dictatorship of one supreme leader whose will is pretty wild and unpredictable, I mentioned that it's unlikely it's going to be a personal sex scandal and most likely probably is kind of he made some kind of political mistake. You don't know what he said and what he did that displeased Xi Jinping. For a person who dealing with the foreigners, this is particularly perilous. One of the reasons the former general Secretary Zhao Ziyang in the 1980s that he was purged was because he told the visiting Gorbachev of the Soviet Union that, oh, I'm not really the boss. The real boss in charge in China is Deng Xiaoping. I mean for that he got into big trouble. People mentioned about many reasons why Jack Ma, former boss of electronic commerce giant Alibaba, he's gone.
He's no longer a major player. I mean he's disconnected from his own company. He got into trouble. People say, oh, he made something remarkable about Chinese banking system. That may be true, but the real reason Jack Ma got into trouble because he met the president of the United States, Donald Trump. To a dictator like Xi Jinping, that would never happen because the supreme leader of China, of Chinese Communist Party should never ask an ordinary citizen like Jack Ma what had transpired between him and the United States President. So I believe truly believe that he got in trouble because he really, really should never have been given the right to meet with the president of the United States, no matter the fact that he was a billionaire. I think Qin Gang is a particularly difficult personality for she because he normally steals the show with the Americans. He represented the kind of a kinder and gentle approach of the United Front diplomacy in sharp contrast with the Wolf Warrior approach. For example, when Gang was briefly the ambassador to the United States before his appointment to become the foreign minister of China, he would go to American University thinktanks to charm with the American scholars. He would open the basketball game at the Wizards in Washington DC. He fired the most prominent Wolf Warriors spokespeople at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So maybe those are the reasons why he was sacked because China has to be belligerent to the United States and maybe he cannot be tolerated.
Shane Leary:
A topic we haven't discussed as much on this podcast thus far is religion in China This week we have a story about Christianity in particular Roman Catholicism. First some background for our listeners. Christianity is nothing new in China with its practice dating back as early as the late 16th century. The official numbers of Christians in China, according to the Chinese Communist Party is 44 million. Although some estimate this much higher, perhaps more than 130 million, it's estimated that China may have the world's largest Christian population by 2030, and there are anywhere from six to 12 million Catholics living in China. But there is profound tension between the CCP and the church with Chinese Catholics having to register with the Catholic Patriotic Association, a governmental organization in China under the authority of the United Front Work Department that manages the Catholic church's activities in the country. This past week, Pope Francis approved the appointment of Bishop Shen Bin to Shanghai.
This comes three months after Beijing and not the Holy Sea appointed him. This is controversial because the should be making these appointments and it goes against a 2018 Accord between the Holy Sea and Beijing, which stipulated that Beijing could suggest bishop appointments, but that ultimately the church would have the final say and the capacity to veto. So after three months of tension, Pope Francis has finally accepted this appointment “for the greater good,” but made it clear that this is the second time Beijing has violated the 2018 agreement. Miles, can you pull apart the significance of this for us? What is the concern from the church's perspective? Why is Beijing so intent on overseeing and controlling the practice of Catholicism on the mainland?
Miles Yu:
It's not just Catholicism. China is the ideological hostility towards all religions has always been consistent. So China's communist party must maintain total control. When I say total control, I mean that total control, over all religious practices, not only Tibet and Xinjiang, but all of China. So that's one of the reason why Falungong groups, Catholics and other denominations of Christianity were under strict state control. Pope Francis is the most left leaning pope in the history of the papacy. He had great illusions about the nature of leadership, particularly CCP, I mean his treatment and cold-shouldering of the prodemocracy true hero of Hong Kong, Cardinal Zen is a disgrace. I mean he just refused to see him in order to gain curry favor with the CCP. You mentioned about 2018. 2018 deal with the CCP is basically this, that both CCP and the Pope would have veto power and both sides would have to be consulted with regard to the appointment of new bishops.
China has repeatedly violated the agreement since 2018. So this agreement was supposed to be renewed every two years and after the repeated violations, and I think the Vatican should have discarded this fantasy in 2020 and 2022 when the agreement was renewed. Now because of this egregious violation of the agreement, and I think the church is suffering from self-inflicted damage on the reputation of the church and the credibility of the Pope himself Shen Bin the new bishop of Shanghai was handpicked by the Chinese Communist Party and the Pope did not know about this installment until days before. At that point the Pope should have said, you know what? I will not approve this, but the Pope went along and approved this anyway. So it shows it's very important to uphold your principle. We have gone far, far away from the glorious days of Pope John Paul II. He was a true leader of the church and he was the champion of human rights. This is both sad and also disappointing.
Shane Leary:
As one last question. I just want to ask Catholics and beyond religious believers in China, what is it like on the ground for a religious practitioner and could you just speak a little bit more about how does China exercise control even at the local and individual level through these governmental organizations?
Miles Yu:
First of all, all forms of religion constitute a direct affront to the totalitarian ideologies of communism. Communism has to be total, has to be totalitarian, and so you have to really control all forms of competing ideologies, particularly organized groups like the Church. The Church poses a challenge to the communist ideology and communist system because it has a belief and also because it has an organizational structure and also because it has a mass appeal. So you cannot just have two or three people to call it religion. You must have thousands and tens of thousands, even millions of followers. So this would never be tolerated ideologically in particular by the party. So that's why all formal religion cannot really be practiced without the Chinese Communist Party's control. The control mechanism of many, many layers. And one of the most important one is basically control the appointment of key religious, shall we say clergy? Chinese communist must really have the power to appoint and dismiss all people.
So through this organization called the Three Selves Organization, that's the one controlled by the party. And of course they also use just brutal force. If you violate this kind of communist control mechanism where history is written in the future about the suffering of the faithful in the People’s Republic of China's going to be a very, very grim read. By the way, there is no difference between the so-called reformers and also the conservatives in China. Every Chinese communist party leader is adhering to this principle of repression and suppression and total elimination of religious faith in China. I mean, you look at the treatment of Uyghurs, right? Uyghurs were posing threat to the Chinese Communist Party. Not only because they're ethnically different, but mostly because they're Muslims. They have a well-organized religious belief that has to be eliminated. So lock them out in the concentration camps, not just to physically eliminate them, but most importantly to indoctrinate them to wipe out, to wash away their religious belief, their ethnic identity. So this is basically brainwashing at its Orwellian level.
Shane Leary:
Well, miles, I think that's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and I'll see you again next week.
Miles Yu:
See you next week.
Thanks for tuning into this episode of the China Insider, a podcast from the China Center at Hudson Institute. We appreciate Hudson for making this podcast possible follow miles and all of the additional great work we do at www.hudson.org. Please remember to rate and review this podcast and we'll see you next time on the China Insider.